Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.
Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my Psalter.
On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the recommending of the Earl of
Exeter, presented Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes,
in Devonshire. Here he was destined to pass the next nineteen years of
his life among surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be a mile away
from London stone was for Herrick to be in exile. Even with railway
and telegraphic interruptions from the outside world, the dullness of a
provincial English town of today is something formidable. The dullness
of a sequestered English hamlet in the early part of the seventeenth
century must have been appalling. One is dimly conscious of a belated
throb of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however discontented or
unhappy he may have been at first in that lonely vicarage, the world may
congratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded him there, far
from the distractions of the town, and with no other solace than his
Muse, for there it was he wrote the greater number of the poems which
were to make his fame.
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